Somewhat surprisingly, a whole series of speakers have been talking about the importance of identity today at the O’Reilly Etel conference. From the telcos (France Telecom in the morning), to several softphone providers, myself and now Microsoft. I’ve also had numerous side conversations with people who recognize the problem, don’t want to contribute to more identity stovepipes and are a very receptive audience for URL-based identity. URLs, and the open, multi-party YADIS effort just make a lot of intuitive sense …

Unfortunately I didn’t get the name of the speaker from Microsoft because he was a last-minute replacement and seems to have disappeared. Although he didn’t title the talk that way, it was really identity that he was talking about, almost exclusively.

Surprisingly, he didn’t mention InfoCard a single time. But then, he was talking about presence and e-mail and real-time communications, and things like that, which I don’t think InfoCard attempts to address. (Does it, can somebody correct me if I’m wrong?) URLs would make a lot of sense for the use cases he was talking about … I wonder how Microsoft is going to integrate those approaches …